@Wintersong, is that one of the main characters from Suikoden III? If not it looks a lot like her.

Back on topic, I'm really looking forward to Fallen Enchantress! I keep reading exciting things about it.

Oh, I wasn't really commenting on where the title should come from. If they want to link it to the books, that's fine with me. I just think they should have come up with a better name for the book.

(Note- this and the previous post were mostly in jest. Mostly.)

Edit: it would be like naming Moby Dick "Caucasian Whaler" or... naming The Odyssey "Greek Sailor."

CAKE!

I have really mixed feelings about this expansion pack. It sounds like it will have lots of great stuff, and I really appreciate the thoughtful realism in Derek's post above. However, I'm a little confused and disappointed by the fact that this will be a separate product.

I feel that the stuff which is planned for the expansion is all stuff which ought to have been in the original game. A living world? Heck yeah! But why is it coming in an expansion, instead of a patch/fix to the original game? Elemental ought to be a living world. We shouldn't have to exit Elemental and emigrate to FE in order to find a living world.

Just to beat this into the ground, I want to recall Frogboy's words on these fora (Sep 2, 2010). He pledged that there would be no new game next year (meaning 2011), and that he would make things right. Even though FE is a branch of Elemental, it is not Elemental, and FE sounds dangerously close to a new game.

Frogboy and folks, please be careful. If you want to branch off ... well ... that's your choice. But please don't forget your commitment to Elemental. Don't rush off too fast. Don't let your visions of the future get in the way of what Elemental could be.

I think most everyone can agree that there are some deep rooted flaws with E:WoM. This has been readily state by frogboy on numerous occasions, and the good people at SD have done an amazing job in their attempts to address the technical shortcomings that many members of the community have run into. They have put out numerous patch designed to address these flaws and make Elemental a lot more fun to play. Yet, the point of a patch is not really to implement design changes or major changes to the core of a game. This is most definitely the realm of a good expansion, which the SD team is working to provide in the form of FE.

While FE is a stand-alone expansion, and in the most broad terms, comes "dangerously close" to a new game, it is the proper forum for the type of significant design changes that the community has hoped for. In fact, since a good portion of players will get the expansion for free and the rest should get a price reduction for owning E:WoM, I can easily say that any arguments, insinuating that frogboy might break his world, feel hollow. Honestly, FE not only sounds like a step in the right direction for a game with massive potential, but also is backed by team who have taken the time and effort to listen to and keep open lines of communication with the community.

As it stands now, Elemental does not appear to be abandoned, nor have the developers stopped producing meaningful patches to address community concerns. I, for one, can easily attest to the hard work of the mod community in continuing to produce meaningful additions to the game. In fact, no one is saying to simply migrate from E:WoM to FE, and no one has even begun to show any attitude with that directly in mind. Yet, it seems odd for one to claim that a game is lacking in one area or another and then moderately protest the creation of an expansion for attempting to address those concerns beyond the scope of the original game. It would appear that these protestations are not because FE is an expansion, but are due to the fact that it will be a separate entity altogether, which one believes will result in the original product stagnating and dying off. Since we as members of the community can only speculate as to the future of a given product, let us do so based on the information which has been readily given by the developers and not based on our worst fears. E:WoM is still getting patched and they have stated that FE will not be the end of E:WoM. Therefore, it is beyond reason to expose wild fears concerning the future of E:WoM several months in advance. This type of fear mongering only hurts that unique connection that our community has with SD.

Wow, I'm glad you replied to this Kenata. I'm grumpy this morning, and am getting very tired of posts like the one you replied to. I wouldn't have been nearly as diplomatic.  

Yay! Wish they did more on that particular series.

I think most of us have had 'wild fears', that is just part of watching someone else bake a cake. I personally had such fears and I know many members of the community have espoused such fears as well. Yet, you should take comfort in knowing that the developers have made time available to the various modders to answer questions, and in fact, if you look at the change logs, several modders, including myself, have been given mention numerous times for finding both issues and solutions with WoM. Stardock really is a unique developer/publisher in a time when most developers and publishers find their communities to be ravenous fanboys who won't be happy anyways. While the push up to FE may find the dev team becoming farther and father removed from the community as they ramp up into another crunch time, we as the community should put our fears on the back burners and take this time to discuss the various points we like and don't like in a civil and rational manner. This will go a lot farther in both strengthening the desire of SD to continue keeping an open dialog with the community as well as ensuring that the cake we end up with is one we all want to eat.

+1

If I can't "remember what I'm doing" on the strategic level after exploring a dungeon, then there's something wrong with the strategic level, not the fact that there's a dungeon to explore.  It certainly didn't break up the experience in AOW - if anything it deepened the sense of exploration and discovery.  Maybe I'm thinking of dungeons differently; I would envision a slightly larger tactical map with FOW.  It would certainly make the quest system more interesting.

Just so you know, there is a post in the mods forum for specific requests for modding changes. If you are really concerned about certain limitations that you have run into, throw up some comment on that thread. Honestly, I disagree with your point about the only thing that can be done is value adjustments. This is simply not true. While you are correct to say that somethings have been hard coded into the engine, there are many interesting things even without effecting these particular pieces. If you look at the various mods which have gained some notoriety, these mods have done many incredible things despite the limitations.

All the mods so far are still the same Elemental game with a new flavor. It's like playing Star wars monopoly. Oh! it's star wars, but you are still playing monopoly.

I want to make a new game, not a different Elemental game.

In my point of view, if you place a variable in the XML, it means that the engine supports a modification of this variable. But there are many variables that has little or no impact on the game because it's hardcoded.